Procedure of the House

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Sutherland of Houndwood

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, as I said when I intervened in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, for me the crucial thing is that this committee should be elected. If people are standing for election to this committee whom we do not think would take a balanced view on the quirky topic and the large topic, then do not vote for them. Surely within this House we are grown-up enough and experienced enough to realise the importance of maintaining a balance in what we do, and can trust our colleagues. The alternative is a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory situation, where you have to wait to get the golden ticket to have your chance to put forward your debates. It has been said that colleagues are going to be lobbying—of course they are, but we lobby our Front-Benchers all the time. Surely all of us are grown-up enough to be able to survive the experience of a bit of lobbying. I support this proposal because it is about strengthening Parliament, and it is by strengthening Parliament that we will increase the respect and standing of Parliament outside.

I think it was my noble friend Lord Higgins who talked about us having tenure. I do not think we have tenure in this House. This House has to prove itself every day in the eyes of the public; I think it does a brilliant job. This measure is at least worth trying, because it could strengthen Parliament, increase our ability to hold the Executive to account, and be seen to be relevant to the interests of those outside who, after all, pay the bills.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I have three points: first, if there is to be a committee it must be elected. There are no doubts about that. Secondly, a major gap has been identified in this debate, and that is the capacity of this House to identify major topics of current concern and debate them urgently. There has to be a way of doing that, whatever comes out of this debate, and I put it to the Leader of the House that he must look at that. Thirdly, we should not vote to have another committee on the basis that this is an experiment. Any committee that I have ever seen that people have tried to kill has been cut in half and then there are two new ones.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Sutherland of Houndwood

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I am prepared to take expert opinion on that. That does not rule out the possibility of the Administrations from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland sitting down with the Westminster Government and working out a quota system for within the UK. It is a broader question how the European Union behaves itself on this matter, and there may be alternative views.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Is it not the position that in practice because the Scottish Government set a budget for the number of Scottish and EU students that they will fund—that is how they operate—all the noble Lord is saying is that there should be a budget for the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland-based students who attend?

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

Certainly the Scottish universities funding council sets an overall budget which will pay for students who, as it turns out now, are resident both in Scotland and in the rest of the European Union. I accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth.

The force of what I have to say is that there needs to be discussion—I suspect it has been rather absent—between the funding councils and those who instruct them to see whether there is a way of removing this anomaly that none of us likes. How did we get here? By a slow process of change that has not had good consequences.

It would be unfair and unjust to discriminate only against the rest of the UK students, and if that is a principle that this House accepts, I hope that it will support the amendment.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Sutherland of Houndwood

Thursday 2nd February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I speak to my Amendment 24. Just to make sure that people realise that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and I agree only on some things, I respectfully remind him that it was the Labour Government who introduced tuition fees.

I remember that particularly well because the only time I have taken a Bill through this House was when the much missed late Lady Blatch was our Front-Bench spokesman. She was ill and asked me to take the Bill through the House. The rather splendid noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, who has sadly been taken from us to other duties, was leading on the Bill. I said to her, “Look, I have a problem”. There was an issue about gap year students having to pay more. I said, “If you will amend the Bill and allow for gap year students, I won’t waste your time and be unnecessarily difficult, but there is another thing I need you to do. I need you to help me to make sure that we do not get a vote on the principle of tuition fees”—which the Liberals were very keen to achieve—“because I'm being told by the powers that be in our party that we have to vote against tuition fees and most of the people on my side would be in the wrong lobby”. So we attempted to avoid having a vote because most of my colleagues rightly recognised that the future of universities depended on having tuition fees.

This is not a debate about the principle of tuition fees. Indeed, my amendment does not mention tuition fees. The Bill is about the exercise of power—we have taken back Antarctica; we are giving other things—and it defines the powers of the Scottish Parliament. The new clause in my amendment is intended to make clear that the Scottish Parliament is free to exercise its powers, but it cannot exercise its powers in a way that discriminates against people from England, Wales and Northern Ireland relative to people in other European states. That is the real wickedness involved in what is happening now: Greeks, Germans, Poles and French all get the same deal as the Scots, but English, Welsh and Northern Ireland people do not. When I say Northern Ireland people, Welsh people and English people, this is not about nationality but about the place where you live.

As I said to someone from the BBC the other day, “You work for the BBC. You get posted to Glasgow. You've got three children who are aged, say, 14, 15 and 16 and they want to go to university. You get rung up by the director-general and told that you have to move to Manchester. That could cost your children £100,000 in fees because they will no longer be eligible to go to some of the best universities in the country”—I declare an interest as a graduate of St Andrews—“such as St Andrews, Edinburgh or Glasgow for free. The moment you move to England, they will have to pay. This is just a complete nonsense. Of course, you could accept a job in Madrid, or Paris or anywhere else in Europe—but not in England, Wales or Northern Ireland”. It is an absurdity.

The real wickedness comes when you say in a reasoned way to Alex Salmond, “This is not fair”. The response you get is: “If Scotland is independent, the English will get the same deal as the Greeks, the French and the Germans”. That is not good enough. I hope that my noble and learned friend is not going to get up and give the same, lame arguments about how this is what devolution is about. No, it is not. Devolution is about making decisions in Scotland in the interests of Scotland. It is not about discriminating against people from the rest of the United Kingdom in a way which was never envisaged during the passage of the Scotland Act through this House.

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, is not in his place. Last week, when we were discussing the Bill, he came up with a brilliant image when, in trying to explain the apparently irrational behaviour of the First Minister and his separatist colleagues, he said that it is a bit like tenants who want to get a move from a bad estate to another estate: the first thing you do is upset the neighbours. This is about upsetting the neighbours, and upsetting the neighbours it is. There is real anger about this.

I stood recently in a rectorial campaign in St Andrews—I only got 900 votes, which is actually not bad for a banker and a Tory these days. The winning candidate was very good indeed. I spent a week in St Andrews with the students. There you have, side by side, students working very hard, much harder than I ever did when I was at St Andrews, in a university which has been transformed. A third of the students are English, a third are Scottish and a third are European or international. The Scottish students will pay nothing. The fees are going up to £9,000 a year and it is a four-year degree, so that is £36,000 if you are English. The European students are paying nothing. They are all working side by side.

The other thing that struck me was that St Andrews just looks the same as it did—most medieval towns do. The restaurants and the pubs are the same. The students are certainly much more focused. However, whereas in my day there were no students working in the restaurants and the bars, there now are. They need to do so in order to make ends meet. It is quite divisive and wrong to have students from different parts of the United Kingdom faced with substantial borrowing and debt, or no debt, simply because of which part of the United Kingdom they live in. I believe that this is a deliberate policy to create anger. There is genuine anger and resentment, not least on the part of those students who feel that they are being given a better deal relative to their colleague than they perhaps deserve.

There is also anger on the part of parents. I suggested to someone who shall remain nameless who was at St Andrews with me that they might like to make a contribution to the university in its 600th anniversary year. She said, “Not on your life! Not while my children are not able to go to St Andrews without having to pay these enormous fees”.

So it is quite wrong. It would be entirely appropriate for the Government to restrict the powers of the Scottish Parliament so that it cannot operate in this way on any area of policy. As the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, a former Secretary of State for Scotland, pointed out, the Barnett formula is extremely generous. The spending per head on education is about 20 per cent higher. It really is adding insult to injury to ask the English to send more money per head north of the border on education for the privilege of seeing their children treated less generously than people from Greece.

If the Prime Minister says that he will defend the union to the last fibre of his being, here is a test. I ask my noble friend to ask the Prime Minister to look at this, and ask him seriously whether we can go on allowing this to happen. This is very timely. Hitherto, the fees have been at levels of £3,000 a year, so it would be £12,000. Now they are going up to £9,000 a year, so it is a huge imposition upon these students and is building enormous resentment. I hope that my noble and learned friend will give this some consideration.

A third party is very angry about this: the universities. I am delighted to see in his place the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, with all his experience of higher education in Scotland. The universities are the poor mugs who have got to set the fees with this difficult and divisive position for their students, and who take all the flack for its consequences. I am not going to press this to a vote today, because I want to give my noble and learned friend time to think about it and come back at a later stage, but I hope that he will take it seriously. This is the first opportunity that we have had since the introduction of tuition fees and top-up fees to debate this matter. It is widely resented around the country. It is a deep, deep injustice which needs to be put right.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I thank my two preceding speakers for their kind remarks. I run the risk of being drawn into this love-in going on across the Benches and I do not especially wish to be, so I hope that they say something nasty about me at some point.

I support the two amendments. Neither is perfect, and they need a bit of further thought, but I particularly welcome their pairing. Amendment 22 illustrates very well the general principles implied in Amendment 24, which are what I wish to speak about. As a declaration of interest, I am a former principal of Edinburgh University. I have links with most of the universities that I will talk about, but that of course includes many south of the border that are our friends, colleagues and competitors. There is a view across the whole country on this which must be taken it account.

The problem, which has been well illustrated, is clearly the differentials in treatment of students from what is now called the RUK group—there is now a formal title in Scotland for the “rest of the United Kingdom”—and students from the European Union. This is disproportionate. The differential between them and the way in which they are now being separated out is unjust and is not something that we happily live with on either side of the border, or in the university system across the country.

This division started quite some time ago. There was a trickle of complaints when fees were originally raised through this mechanism but they were small sums of money, comparatively speaking. This trickle grew into a pretty strong stream when the target hit £3,000 and is now a vast torrent. There will be much irritation and anger, and a great degree of thinking twice about where to study as a result of this policy.

The figures in question come out of a series of decisions taken on the administration of higher education which started in 1992, when the two funding councils were separated. On grounds of consistency, I have to say that I opposed that separation. Indeed, if you read the relevant speech of the Member for West Lothian in the other place at the time, you will see that he quotes me as being against it. That was because I began to worry then about the kind of separation that will take, and has taken, place. The two funding councils are proceeding well according to their own administrative arrangements. I do not blame the accounting officers or members there. They have financial settlements imposed upon them by government, not least by this House.

The division that occurred then has grown in practice, perhaps in a way in which none had envisaged and certainly in a way that most of us regret. The issue today is not whether you can turn the clock back completely. Devolution has happened; I accept that. The issue is whether we want the kind of devolution that produces this sad differential between students from different countries and different areas within the United Kingdom.